Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts

Shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books
Leading psychologist Charles Fernyhough blends the most current science with literature and personal stories in Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts.
A new consensus is emerging among cognitive scientists: rather than possessing fixed, unchanging memories, they have found that we create recollections anew each time we are called upon to remember. According to psychologist Charles Fernyhough, remembering is an act of narrative imagination as much as it is the product of a neurological process.
An NPR and Psychology Today contributor, Dr. Fernyhough guides readers through the fascinating new science of autobiographical memory, covering topics such as: navigation, imagination, and the power of sense associations to cue remembering. Exquisitely written and meticulously researched, Pieces of Light brings together science and literature, the ordinary and the extraordinary, to help us better understand our powers of recall and our relationship with the past.

Self-Help

FERNYHOUGH, CHARLES

Memory Improvement

Harper

Reference

Harper-perennial

A luminous exploration of the nature of thoughts, from daydreams to the voices in our heads At the moment you caught sight of this book, what were you thinking? Was your thought a stream of sensations? Or was it a voice in your head? Did you ask yourself, "I wonder what that's about?" Did you answer? And what does it mean if you did? When someone says they hear voices in their head, they are often thought to be mentally ill. But, as Charles Fernyhough argues in The Voices Within, such voices are better understood as one of the chief hallmarks of human thought. Our inner voices can be self-assured, funny, profound, hesitant, or mean; they can appear in different accents and even in sign language. We all hear them-and we needn't fear them. Indeed, we cannot live without them: we need them, whether to make decisions or to bring a book's characters to life as we read. Studying them can enrich our understanding of ourselves, and our understanding of the world around us; it can help us understand the experiences of visionary saints, who might otherwise be dismissed as schizophrenics; to alleviate the suffering of those who do have mental health problems; and to understand why the person next to us on the subway just burst out laughing for no apparent reason. Whether the voices in our heads are meandering lazily or clashing chaotically, they deserve to be heard. Bustling with insights from literature, film, art, and psychology, The Voices Within offers more than science; it powerfully entreats us all to take some time to hear ourselves think.

The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Mental Health

Basic Books

A father's intimate look at his daughter's developing mind from birth to age three. Unlike any other time in our lives, we remember almost nothing from our first three years. As infants, not only are we like the proverbial blank slate, but our memories are like Teflon: nothing sticks. In this beautifully written memoir of his daughter's first three years, Charles Fernyhough combines his vivid observations with a synthesis of developmental theory, re-creating what that time, lost to the memory of adults, is like from a child's perspective. In A Thousand Days of Wonder, Fernyhough, a psychologist and novelist, attempts to get inside his daughter Athena's head as she acquires all the faculties that make us human, including social skills, language, morality, and a sense of self. Written with a father's tenderness and a novelist's empathy and style, this unique book taps into a parent's wonder at the processes of psychological development. Funny, touching, and fascinating, A Thousand Days of Wonder will reveal the extraordinary journey into personhood that children make during the momentous first three years of life.

A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist's Chronicle of His Daughter's Developing Mind

Psychology & Counseling

Avery

A father's intimate look at his daughter's developing mind from birth to age three Unlike any other time in our lives, we remember almost nothing from our first three years. As infants, not only are we like the proverbial blank slate but our memories are like teflon: nothing sticks. In this beautifully written account of his daughter's first three years, Charles Fernyhough combines his vivid observations with a synthesis of developmental theory, re-creating what that time, lost to the memory of adults, is like from a child's perspective. In A Thousand Days of Wonder, Fernyhough, a psychologist and novelist, attempts to get inside his daughter's head as she acquires all the faculties that make us human, including social skills, language, morality, and a sense of self. Written with a father's tenderness and a novelist's empathy and style, this unique book taps into a parent's wonder at the processes of psychological development.

Penguin Publishing Group

Pieces of Light: The new science of memory

Shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize 2013 and the 2013 Best Book of Ideas Prize.Memory is an essential part of who we are. But what are memories, and how are they created? A new consensus is emerging among cognitive scientists: rather than possessing a particular memory from our past, like a snapshot, we construct it anew each time we are called upon to remember. Remembering is an act of narrative as much as it is the product of a neurological process. Pieces of Light illuminates this theory through a collection of human stories, each illustrating a facet of memory's complex synergy of cognitive and neurological functions.Drawing on case studies, personal experience and the latest research, Charles Fernyhough delves into the memories of the very young and very old, and explores how amnesia and trauma can affect how we view the past. Exquisitely written and meticulously researched, Pieces of Light blends science and literature, the ordinary and the extraordinary, to illuminate the way we remember and forget.

Profile Books

For Charles Fernyhough, the birth of his daughter Athena was an opportunity to view the psychological development and growth of a child first hand. Integrating scientific research with careful observation and questioning, this unique study investigates what it is like to be a newborn baby, an infant on the threshold of language, and a toddler testing out autonomy. Using Athena as a case study, Fernyhough vividly describes the huge amount of mental work children undertake right from birth, including the newborn’s task of learning about objects and people; the toddler’s forging of a self; the development of a sense of time and space; and the process of coming to grasp with the transforming power of the imagination. En route, he explains in simple terminology the ideas of the great child psychologistsincluding Vygotsky, Piaget, and Bowlbyand introduces some of the latest neuroscientific and developmental research. Written with a father’s tenderness and a keen scientific eye, this funny, touching, and fascinating investigation will allow parents and all those interested by child development to understand the extraordinary journey a child makes during the first three years of life.

The Baby in the Mirror: A Child's World from Birth to Three

Granta UK

In Las voces interiores, the psychologist Charles Fernyhough offers the results of a vast body of original research, as well as a multitude of points of cultural connection, to tell us how our inner voices operate and in what way they are related with creativity and development.

Las voces interiores (Spanish Edition)

EDICIONES OBELISCO S.L.

Le voci dentro. Storia e scienza del dialogo interiore

Conchiglie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by FERNYHOUGH, CHARLES. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by FERNYHOUGH, CHARLES

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by FERNYHOUGH, CHARLES. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts

Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts

The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves

A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist's Chronicle of His Daughter's Developing Mind

A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist's Chronicle of His Daughter's Developing Mind

Pieces of Light: The new science of memory

The Baby in the Mirror: A Child's World from Birth to Three

Las voces interiores (Spanish Edition)

Le voci dentro. Storia e scienza del dialogo interiore